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Generally, soulmates get married within a few months of meeting each other. Jenny’s best friend in college met her soulmate and threw her life plans out the window to go have a big, expensive wedding in the country with her family, her soulmate’s family, and pretty much every family that had ever existed. It’s not exactly a leap of faith—a soulmate marriage that hasn’t worked out is pretty much unheard of—but it’s still always seemed like a reckless, impulsive move to Jenny.
She’s thinking a lot about this as she moves the seventh box into the new house.
Rupert’s fussing with the stove in the kitchen when Jenny puts the box down on their table, and he looks up and gives her this sweet little sideways smile when he sees her. “This is a rubbish stove,” he says. “We might have to go appliance shopping, or, or maybe you can figure out some way to fix it up a bit, you’re practically a wizard with appliances—”
“It’s not that bad, you’re just picky,” Jenny informs him affectionately, crossing the room to kiss him. “There’s still a bunch of stuff in the truck, but I think the kids are getting some of it.”
“Make sure Willow doesn’t get to any of my grimoires,” Rupert warns her. “She seems to have expressed an interest in magic-using, and I’d prefer for her to discover it with proper instruction.”
“Got it,” Jenny agrees. “Also we totally need a new mattress, it kinda got broken in transit and I think we might have to sleep on the couch tonight.”
“I’d say romantic if I thought my back could take it,” says Rupert ruefully, turning back to the stove.
“Don’t electrocute yourself,” Jenny calls over her shoulder, exiting the kitchen and grinning at Buffy and Willow on her way out of the house again.
Sometimes Jenny has to wonder if Rupert could be the universe’s way of telling her that soulmates are real. She’s a little resentful about it, truth be told; she’s never been one for destiny, and she’s definitely not a big fan of people telling her what to do. But some things are too weird and unshakable to ignore, like the blood-red A on her wrist or the fact that Rupert’s the only other person she’s ever met who’s never going to have a soulmate.
Rupert could probably be her soulmate, all things considered, and they’re both sure as hell acting like he is. Jenny hasn’t once moved in with anyone she’s dating, let alone bought a house with them. An actual house, with two bedrooms and a sunlit kitchen and a cozy living room and all kinds of things that remind her she’s an adult in a committed relationship. The distance between her and her family has never loomed so large.
Jenny crosses the street to the moving truck, where Xander and Willow’s new friend Oz are having a conversation about music, and lifts up another box. “You two are taller than me,” she informs them both, “and I am a tiny computer science teacher, you should be lifting a few more boxes at least.”
“On it,” says Xander, jumping up and nearly knocking over Rupert’s fancy lamp (which seems to be in constant danger of breaking). Oz winces a little.
The box Jenny’s carrying is one of Rupert’s book boxes, meant for the extra bedroom that they’ll be converting into an at-home library. Something about that makes Jenny feel warm and fuzzy and excited; she’s not sure if she can count on spending the rest of her life with Rupert, but she’s starting to kind of want to, in a way that goes beyond matching marks and destiny.
There’s a sudden, sharp pain in her wrist. Jenny draws in a breath, nearly dropping the box of books. As it is, she has to shift it to her hip and place it down slowly, thinking that maybe the box cut her or something, but when she raises her wrist to her eyes, all she sees is a raw redness around her soulmate mark.
“Damn it,” she mutters. The first-aid kit is somewhere in the house or somewhere in a box, she can’t remember which one. Picking up the box again, she enters the house and nearly collides with a giggling Buffy. “Whoops! Sorry, sweetie.”
“No problem,” says Buffy breathlessly, “Willow and I were just—”
“Tag you’re it no tag-backs!” Willow shouts, shoving Buffy into Jenny and sprinting into the kitchen. Buffy shrieks indignantly and sprints after her girlfriend, nearly bowling over Rupert as he exits the kitchen.
Laughing, Jenny hurries to steady Rupert. “It’s a nice house,” he says weakly, pushing his glasses up his nose. “A bit small for the children to be running about in, but I suppose they can’t help being children about it.”
“We did invite them to help,” Jenny points out, grinning. “And you know the risks of letting Willow and Buffy run wild.”
“I’m of the mind that they’re all bad influences on each other,” Rupert grumbles, but at this point he’s just complaining for the sake of complaining, so Jenny nods sympathetically and steers him over to a chair. “You all right?” he adds as he sits, eyes flickering to the raw spot on Jenny’s wrist.
Jenny makes a face. “Box injury,” she says. “Moving’s hazardous. You don’t know where the first-aid kit is, do you?”
“I believe it’s in my car,” Rupert answers, “there’s always a spare in my car, and I’m of the mind that we should get you one of your own considering the town we live in, Jenny, I don’t want you getting hurt—”
His words are starting to run together with anxious sweetness, and the way he looks at Jenny is making her feel like she’s someone incredibly special, so she leans down over the chair and gives him a long, soft kiss, letting him pull her down onto his lap. “I’m gonna be fine, baby,” she whispers against his mouth.
“Don’t call me that, it is distastefully American,” Rupert mumbles happily, pulling her close.
“Oh my god you guys have to stop that,” comes Buffy’s voice from the doorway. Willow giggles and says something quietly to Buffy, to which Buffy loudly and indignantly responds, “I don’t care that it’s their house, we’re still here and it’s so gross!”
Jenny and Rupert break apart, not without reluctance. “You kids want dinner?” Jenny asks, clambering off Rupert’s lap. “I can order pizza, or we can all watch Rupert complain about the stove.”
“Ha ha,” says Rupert.
This is how I want to spend my life, Jenny thinks, trying out the realization. Another stinging pain shoots through her wrist. “Hey, I’m going to go out and get the first-aid kit from your car,” she tells Rupert, patting his shoulder as she passes, and throws a last smile over her shoulder at the well-lit living room.
A lot of gossip starts floating around the staff room a few days after Rupert and Jenny move in together, especially since it’s common knowledge that they aren’t soulmates. Most of the gossip is in relation to sex without protection and Jenny being pregnant and Rupert being too traditional to let Jenny raise the baby on her own. No one seems ready to consider that two people who aren’t soulmates might want to be together, and something about that makes Jenny frustrated and hurt.
Willow gets it. Willow gets it possibly a little bit more than Jenny, actually. “My mom lets Buffy sleep in my bedroom,” she’s saying, curled on the couch with her head tucked into Jenny’s side. “And—I know it’s a small thing, I know I should be happy that she doesn’t ask, but she doesn’t think to ask, you know? She walked in on us kissing once and she didn’t say anything, just handed me a few articles on how experimentation is normal at my age and that I shouldn’t be worried about turning gay.” She smiles a little bitterly. “Like it’s something for me to be worried about.”
Jenny squeezes Willow’s shoulder. “Willow,” she says, “if you ever stay over here, you and Buffy are staying in separate rooms. You are much too young to be having sex.”
Willow laughs, a wobbly noise that sounds like she wants to cry, and says with tentative playfulness, “But Ms. Calendar, I promise I’ll be responsible!”
“I was young once too, you know,” Jenny teasingly reprimands her, smoothing down Willow’s hair. “I know how these things are when you’re in love.”
Willow stills. Then she says, “Ms. Calendar—have you ever been in love?”
Jenny blinks. Feels her heart flutter. “Getting there,” she says, and it’s the truth.
The scrape from the box is bruising. Reddish-blue and raised, curving across the A in a way that makes it look like a different letter, maybe an R or a B. Jenny has been trying to ignore it, but when she knocks it against the edge of the bureau and curses like a sailor, Rupert all but drags her downstairs to put some ice on it.
“Good lord, Jenny, how do you do this to yourself,” he says reprovingly, his hands gentle on her wrist as he presses the ice pack against her bruise.
“This coming from the guy who gave me not one, not two, but five hickeys a few nights ago,” says Jenny, mouth quirking up.
“That’s different,” says Rupert, and though his attention stays focused on Jenny’s injury, the tips of his ears do go a bit red.
“If you say so,” says Jenny, and lets her free hand rest on Rupert’s knee, sliding up his thigh.
Rupert smiles, soft and slow, and lifts his head to kiss Jenny sweetly, pulling away to rest his forehead against hers. “You do need to be careful,” he says. “For my sake, at least.”
“It’s a damn scrape, Rupert,” says Jenny, half-laughing, “it’s not like that time when—” She stops herself.
Rupert’s smile fades a bit. “When we went down to fight the Master,” he says, “and he tossed you against a wall.”
Rupert had killed the Master, in the end, more panicked dumb luck than anything. Jenny had been pulling herself up, bruised and shaken, and he’d been trying to protect her as best he could, and somehow he’d tripped the Master and knocked him onto a nearby stalagmite (or stalactite? whichever one came up from the bottom of a cave) and the Master had dissolved into dust and bone.
Neither of them talk about how close they both came to dying down there, or how probable it would have been that their deaths might have led to Buffy investigating herself and dying at the hands of the Master. They seem to be in mutual agreement that it’s not what could have been that matters, but what is.
This is true, of course, but Jenny still wishes she had thought things through a little more before charging down into battle. Looking at Rupert makes her think they can move mountains; it frightens her. She changes the subject. “I think most of the teachers at school think I’m pregnant,” she says, a tentative laugh in her voice.
Rupert grins. “Did I miss a memo?” he teases, kissing her again. “Is there an impending Giles-Calendar I need to know about?”
“Calendar-Giles,” Jenny corrects, grinning when Rupert rolls his eyes, “and no.” She presses her hands to his chest, kissing his nose. “Just a lot of dumb office gossip.” She hesitates, then says, “It frustrates me a little that that’s what they jump to, you know? Like we’ve got to be soulmates or having a baby or something to have any semblance of a meaningful relationship.”
“We could have a baby,” Rupert says, mouth twitching. “Defy the stereotypes by subverting them and making them our choice.”
“Pretty sure a kid’s a bigger commitment than a tool with which to make a statement,” Jenny points out. “Probably doesn’t help that we live on a Hellmouth, either.”
“Maybe someday,” says Rupert.
That startles Jenny. “Someday?” she echoes.
Rupert’s smile flickers a little, and he looks uncharacteristically forthright when he says softly, “Being with you—it makes me want things like that.”
Jenny knows he’s not really talking about a baby. Rupert’s good with kids, but he’s said quite a few times that he doesn’t think he’s cut out to be a dad if it would mean focusing on his kid instead of his Slayer, and they both don’t want to talk about what might happen if Rupert ends up outliving Buffy. What he’s saying, in a roundabout sort of way, is that Jenny makes him want to be the sort of person who can choose his own destiny. Not just that—the sort of person who can choose her as his destiny.
And shit, that means a lot coming from him. More than Jenny had ever been expecting, really. “Hey,” she says, and stands up, taking his hands to pull him up with her. “You think we’d be each other’s destiny in a perfect kind of world?”
“I think you’re the sort of woman who doesn’t limit herself to just one destiny,” says Rupert, smiling a little, and kisses Jenny in that way that gets her weak in the knees; passionate if she wants it, tender the way she likes it. He pulls back, smile still lingering in an amazed, sentimental kind of way, and says, “Jenny, I think we’re falling in love.”
Jenny wakes up in the morning when Rupert’s still asleep and notices dark blue ink on the bedsheets next to her. Frowning, she pulls herself up to a sitting position and gasps softly when she inadvertently puts weight on her wrist. Raising her wrist to her eyes, she sees that it’s covered in that same inky substance; it’s got the same consistency as dried blood, and her wrist hurts like it’s been seriously injured, but unless Jenny’s missed some kind of weird supernatural memo, she doesn’t bleed ink the exact same color as Rupert’s favorite pen—
Wait.
Jenny races to the bathroom, heedless of waking up Rupert, and slams the door shut behind her, immediately turning on the faucet and scrubbing at her wrist. She grits her teeth through the pain—this ink is ridiculously difficult to get off—and ends up working at her wrist for a good few minutes before the caked-on ink finally begins to come off.
She knows what she’s going to see before it’s there, and feels a horrible, painful twist when she does. Badly stamped over the half-faded A, written in Rupert’s perfect cursive, is REG.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” Rupert asks at breakfast, frowning a bit. “It’s still August, Jenny, weren’t you talking about wearing that lovely sundress you got at the pier?”
“Fine,” says Jenny, “fine, I, I just felt like a change of clothing is all. Change of pace.” With a shaking hand, she draws her leather jacket closer around her.
“Jenny, you look thoroughly shaken,” Rupert says, sounding genuinely concerned. “Is everything—”
“Yeah,” says Jenny, taking a very long sip of her coffee until it burns her tongue. Her wrist still hurts, even though the ink seems to have stopped seeping from it. It’s sort of like a badly-done tattoo over the A, which has turned an ugly reddish-brown. “Things just, I, I need—” Her voice catches.
“Jenny,” says Rupert softly, and crosses the kitchen to pull her up and into his arms. Jenny flinches away. “Is—” His face twists painfully. “Is this because I talked about falling in love?”
“I don’t know,” says Jenny hopelessly, before remembering that he doesn’t know about her fucked-up arm and he probably just thinks she’s pulling away. “No,” she says, then, “Maybe,” then, “I just, I need some time to myself—research—” and darts around him to head back into the bedroom.
Rupert doesn’t follow her. Jenny thinks that that’s probably a good thing; she feels too much of a mess to really deal with him at the moment. Sitting down on the edge of the bed, she buries her face in her hands and tries to regulate her breathing.
This is straight-up just not supposed to happen. Rupert’s name is not supposed to be on her arm in any capacity, let alone stamped over the A like it’s some kind of horrible parasite. That’s the whole point, the whole reason Rupert started looking at her like she was someone special; they had marks that would never match anyone else’s. Now Jenny’s mark is becoming a man she can never have all to herself and Rupert’s alone all over again and it’s all Jenny’s damn fault for loving him so much—
“Oh, darling,” she hears Rupert whispering, and she realizes very distantly that she’s started crying. Loudly, too, and in a horribly embarrassing way, one that isn’t at all graceful or restrained. Rupert sits down next to her on the bed, still a respectable distance away, giving her an opportunity for comfort without forcing her into it.
Jenny can’t bring herself to reach out to him, so she sort of lets herself fall sideways into him. Rupert carefully pulls her hands away from her face, tugging her into his arms, and she sobs into his shoulder for about two seconds before she forces herself to stop crying and look up at him. “I’m sorry,” she says, voice wobbling, and rolls up her sleeve, flipping her wrist out to show him the haphazard mess she’s made of everything.
Rupert blinks. “That’s what has you crying?” he says, sounding genuinely hurt.
Jenny suddenly feels too tired to articulate what she’s afraid of, but she’s getting the sense that she’s going to have to. “I’m—we’re—built on, on the concept that there’s no one out there for either of us,” she says clumsily. “And—I think—I chose you when I wasn’t supposed to, but I don’t want to let go of my destiny when it’s what’s keeping us together, and now my wrist is all fucked up because I won’t let go—”
“Oh,” murmurs Rupert, “darling,” and kisses her forehead, then her nose, then her mouth, all very gentle like he thinks she might break. “I didn’t start loving you because of any mark,” he says gently, “I started loving you when you stayed all night to help me research the Master. I love you, Jenny, not what you think you’re supposed to be.”
“These marks mean something—”
“My mark means I’m tied to something that isn’t you,” says Rupert. “Do you think either of us would choose that, if we could? It makes me love you more that you’re strong enough to break away from destiny.” His other hand traces her mark. “Even if it hurts you so clearly, Jenny—you’ve always been the braver of us two, and I’ve always admired you for it.”
Jenny swallows. “You love me?” she says finally, softly. She knows he does—that isn’t what she’s asking.
“I choose you,” says Rupert. “No matter what this mark says. I thought you knew—”
“I wanted,” says Jenny, realizing only as she says it, “to believe that these marks meant we were—made for each other. In a weird, messed-up way, sure, but it meant we had a connection that was just as supernatural and wonderful as any two soulmates.” She exhales, laughing. “I want you to be my soulmate,” she says, bitter and amused. “God, if that isn’t the most pathetic—”
Rupert frowns a little, then smiles slightly. “Sit here,” he says, and jumps up from the bed, leaving a startled Jenny to watch as he hurries over to the bureau.
“What—”
“Wait,” says Rupert, holding up a hand without turning from the bureau. Jenny can’t exactly make out what he’s doing, but he opens a drawer, takes out a pen, rolls up his sleeve, fusses a bit with his mark, and then shuts the drawer again, turning back to her.
“I’m sorry,” Jenny begins immediately.
“Shh,” says Rupert, and flips out his right wrist. Written messily above his W are Jenny’s own initials. “They wouldn’t be visible across the black,” he explains, “so I—had to adjust, a bit.”
“They’ll wear off,” says Jenny, a slow, incredulous smile spreading across her face.
Rupert’s grinning, looking at Jenny like she’s the center of the world. “Then you’ll write them again,” he crosses the room, taking Jenny’s ink-scarred wrist in his hands, “and again,” he presses his mouth to his initials on Jenny’s wrist, “and again,” and he seals his promise with a kiss—passionate the way she wants it, tender the way she likes it.
The ink fades, after that, the whole tangled mess of it, and Rupert’s initials fade along with them. Jenny isn’t afraid, this time around; the way it feels to be really, truly in love transcends anything any mark could tell her. In a strange way, she thinks that’s what her mark told her for the short time it was there: love is what you make of it.